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National Canners Association 



New York Convention 
1915 



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Address of Dr. Carl L. Alsberg, Chief of Bureau of Chemistry, 
Washington, D. C. 



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Address of Dr. Carl L. Alsberg, Chief of Bureau of Chemistry, Depart- 
ment of Agriculture, before the Convention of the National 
Canners Association at New York, Feb. 11, 1915. 

Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. President: 

Last year I had the privilege of addressing this Association in 
Baltimore, and at that time I had the opportunity to point out to you 
that not only the consumer benefited by the rigid enforcement of the 
Food and Drugs Act, but also the honest manufacturer, who was 
protected from unfair competition — I believe I used that term at that 
time — and since then that phrase has become more widely used. 

I nnde appeal to you to look at the law from that angle, because 

I felt sure that those of you who had not looked at it from that angle, 

M A who stopped to think, would see that the law was quite as valuable 

o you in protecting you from the unfair competition of some of your 

rivals as it was in protecting the consumer from fraud and from 

objectionable, deleterious food products. 

This year I am going to talk, if you will bear with me kindly, 
on an entirely different matter. I feel that this year I am acquainted 
with you, that we can have a little family talk about certain matters 
that are of the greatest interest and importance to all of us. I am 
going to talk on some rather technical matters, which are of interest 
primarily to you gentlemen as manufacturers. I may say that I 
proposed to discuss hygienic matters. 

First is the question of sanitation in the factory. I know that 
many of you have plants which vie with a hospital ward in cleanliness 
and neatness; I know also that some of you have plants which do not 
reach this ideal by a good deal. My experience and the experience of 
the inspectors who assist me in the work of the Bureau has been that 
when the conditions in one of your plants are not what they should 
be from the sanitary or cleanliness point of view, it is, as a rule, the 
result of a misunderstanding of what the term "cleanliness" means, 
and not any willful intent to put out a product that is anything but 
clean, as manifestly it is to nobody's advantage to put out a product 
that is not clean. 

The canning industry is a new industry; it is not much over half a 
century, if it has really half a century of history, since with many 
other food industries it was transferred from the home kitchen to the 
factory. The introduction of steam has resulted in the complete revo- 
lution of our industrial life. They used to card and spin wool at home; 
it is now done in the factory. They used to weave linen in the home; 
it is now done in the factory. 

This industrialization has not been limited to the manufacturing 

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of machinery, clothing and similar objects of use, but it has spread and 
is ever spreading to the manufacture of food. We have been for half 
a century or more undergoing a revolution in our methods of feeding 
ourselves, and more and more of the processes which were formerly 
done in the home are being transferred to the factory. 

Many of us unquestionably regret that condition, but regrets will 
not stop the course of events and we must be prepared to face a con- 
tinual change and revolution in the manufacture of food products. 
There will continue to be a larger and larger percentage of them 
manufactured in the factory, and a smaller and smaller percentage 
of them manufactured in the home. 

This change which has been going on in the manufacture of food 
products is a fairly recent one, and the transfer has been from the 
kitchen of the home to the factory, and naturally, in making that 
transfer, the manufacturer applied the same methods that were used in 
the home to the factory. Now, those methods are not applicable. 
What is cleanliness in the kitchen, what is good enough for the house- 
wife, from the point of cleanliness, is not good enough for the factory. 
(Applause.) 

It is perfectly natural that the average man in your line of 
business is inclined to think that what is good enough in his wife's 
kitchen is good enough for his factory, and to realize that is not the 
case is to understand what the real principles of cleanliness are- 
the principles that have become a matter of routine in the hospital 
ward. I do not mean to imply that you have to have your buildings 
without any corners and have disinfecting apparatus around, but in a 
way the same principles that are applied in the hospitals must be ap- 
plied in your factories. They are perfectly simple and perfectly inex- 
pensive to apply if every one of you were thoroughly familiar with 
them. 

There is an industry which has had a history somewhat similar 
to the history of your industry, only its change from the home and the 
kitchen to the factory happened some centuries ago. That industry is 
the industry of brewing. Some hundreds of years ago, beer was manu- 
factured at home; it was a house industry. Every farm house in 
Europe, at least in Northern Europe, grew its own barley, made its 
own malt, grew its own hops, made its own beer. But economic 
reasons forced that industry to change from a house industry to a 
factory industry some centuries ago. In consequence, that industry 
has some centuries of history behind it which you gentlemen as yet 
have not, and in the course of those centuries of history, that industry 
has learned exactly what is necessary for it to do in order to put out 
a cleanly product. 

Now, this industry had a greater incentive for absolute cleanliness 
in the factory than the canning industry has had till recently, and that 
incentive is that any slop or lack of cleanliness in a brewery ruins the 
product, spoils the flavor. 

Brewing depends upon the growth of a very definite plant in the 
extract of malt, which is known to the brewer as wort, and which, 
after it has become fermented by this plant growing in it, is termed 
"beer." Now, beer is made by the growth of this plant, yeast, in the 
extract of malt, and it is necessary that only this one species of plant 



should grow in the malt extract. The brewer is constantly subjected 
to the danger that some other plants may grow in his wort, and 
then he gets a product which is bad in flavor and unsalable. Only by 
exercising the greatest degree of cleanliness to prevent the infection 
of his product with some strange yeast or mould can he be sure of 
putting out a uniform and satisfactory product. As a result of this 
absolute necessity of having only what is termed a pure culture of 
yeast growing in the wort in order to get the proper beer, the brewing 
industry in the course of centuries has developed a certain definite 
technique of construction which will enable brewers to keep their 
plant and every part of it clean from undesirable yeasts, enabling them 
to turn out a uniform product. 

It has been the work of centuries. There is not now the same 
need to take centuries to develop in any other industry the same kind 
of technique, because we have made scientific progress today which 
enables us to do in a few years what was learned in centuries by the 
trial and failure method. 

Until a few years ago, there was really no incentive for the canner 
to develop a technique similar to that which the danger of losing his 
beer through spoilage compelled the brewer to develop, but the 
passage cf the Food and Drugs Act gave to those of the canners that 
were paying no attention to this matter the necessary incentive. I am 
glad to say there has been an enormous stride forward in sanitation 
in canning factories within the last decade. It is really an exceedingly 
simple matter to observe the necessary precautions in a plant. I 
would like to illustrate by a concrete example. Some time last summer 
we had a communication from a manufacturer of pulp. He said he 
had a model plant, he bought the best tomatoes, he sorted them 
thoroughly, but his bacteriologist, who was controlling his plant, 
turned in reports that he would rather not tell us about, because if he 
told us we might seize some of his goods. 

Following the policy of the department, that it is better to make 
prosecutions unnecessary than to make a record of a maximum 
number of notices of judgment, we sent an expert to this man's 
factory. It was quite evident the man was straight and thoroughly 
sincere, and that he really was doing the best that he could, but 
nevertheless turning out a product of which he was ashamed. 

Our expert reached the plant. He found that looking at it super- 
ficially, it seemed an excellent plant; the sorting was being done 
adequately, and I would like to digress here a moment and say that in 
the making of pulp, or catsup, the most important step in the whole 
process, as far as we can see, is adequate sorting, is having sufficient 
help to do the sorting so that you are quite sure that very little 
decayed material gets into your product. 

An investigation of this man's equipment showed that his crushing 
box was not being properly cleaned. Although superficial inspection 
showed that it seemed to be clean, it revealed a series of wooden 
piping that you could not get at, through which the pulp was pumped 
or allowed to flow; it revealed tanks placed under machines where 
you could not see whether they were clean or not, that you could not 
get at; and it revealed a lack of stiff brushes and similar ordinary 
mechanical cleaning devices in the factory. Our expert took a sample 
of the material that covered the surfaces of the crushing box — not 



the product that was going through the crusher, but the material that 
was clinging to the sides of the box — and found that the number of 
moulds in that material was infinite, which was his way of stating that 
they were more than he could count under the microscope; that the 
yeast count was five hundred and nineteen. This is not in the pulp 
that was going through, but this is in the material that clung to the 
wall of the crusher. He reported that there were one and a half 
million bacteria in that material and also a certain number, a very 
considerable number, of nematodes, minute microscopic worms which 
occur in enormous quantities in water and in soil. Sometimes a single 
cubic foot of soil may contain some millions of these tiny animals. 
They are to the soil and to water perhaps what inspects are to the 
atmosphere, they may be so numerous. He found that the material 
that he could scrape off the wooden pipes had an enormous number 
of moulds, over four thousand yeasts, and over a million bacteria. He 
found that the catsup which was being made contained a count of 45 
moulds, 75 spores and about 50,000,000 bacteiia. 

Then he showed the men how to keep the place clean; he had 
them take the tanks and make them removable so that you could get 
at the inside of them and see what you were doing; he made them 
arrange the pipes so that they could be cleaned. The total expenditure 
of the whole thing was probably not $25, and the amount of labor that 
was necessary was entirely insignificant, very much less than .hey had 
used in keeping their place clean before he came. They has been 
applying their efforts to all the places in the plant that were easy to 
get at, and overlooking the dark corners and the covered places. 

The day after they had their first cleaning, the count was worse, 
the reason, of course, perfectly plain — they had loosened everything 
up so that a certain percentage of the material clinging to the wall of 
the tanks and the pipes was washed off. The second day the count 
came back to what it was before the cleaning- had taken place. On 
the third day they were down to 30 moulds, 21 yeasts and spores, and 
9,000,000 bacteria. And after they cleaned 15 or 20 times, the usual 
routine of cleaning, they were down to 15 moulds, 7 yeasts or spores, 
and 7,000,000 bacteria. The total cost was not $50, and the total 
amount of labor was no more than they had been putting in before; 
in fact, it was less work to clean when it was properly done, and the 
plant had been revamped so that every dark corner and every hidden 
spot could be gotten at than before. 

We feel confident that most of the trouble that you gentlemen 
have been having in connection with your work, let us say in connec- 
tion with tomato pulp, can come from two sources — one is that you 
have not sorted properly, and the other is that your plant is so con- 
structed that you cannot get at every dark corner, into every pipe, and 
keep it clean. It is very inexpensive to readjust a plant so that the 
problem of labor that is involved in cleaning a plant, is no greater 
and probably less than in a plant in which everything is screwed down, 
and you cannot take anything out and get at it. 

Another difficulty that you gentlemen are having is based on the 
fact that there are only a limited number of people who might be 
called professional canners. Until recently, almost anybody, as far as 
I am informed, who had some administrative ability might be used as 
a manager of a cannery. It strikes me that yours is a profession as 
truly as almost any other, that sooner or later your industry will have 
to come down to the point of training people for the management of 



the canneries. To go back again to the brewers. If they keep their 
breweries clean it is because if they do not they ruin their product 
and lose their trade. The brewers have found that if they want to have 
people run their plants, they have to train them, and brewing schools 
have been old institutions. They have been training brewers abroad, 
I do not know how long, but certainly for 75 years. There are brewing 
schools in this country. Now, I do not think anyone of us will for a 
moment believe that it takes less skill and less brains to make a series 
of canned goods than to make beer. I for one think that it takes more 
skill to run a cannery, putting out a large number of different prod- 
ucts, than to run a brewery, which brews perhaps only one or two 
products. I feel confident that the time will come when you gentlemen 
will want to employ people whom you can train for your business, 
when you will not want to experiment with men who have not been 
trained to run your plants. The need for such men is particularly 
great because you cannot centralize the canning business, since you 
have to be where the products are to can. You cannot build one enor- 
mous plant that will handle the product of a whole state; you have to 
have smaller plants scattered where your raw material is. It appears 
to me that one of the things you need is to have people who are 
trained for your work. I do not believe that the problem of training 
those people will be solved by getting a university or an agricultural 
college or a technical school to give courses in industrial canning. 
You gentlemen do not want scientists for your plants; you need the 
help and advice of the scientists, but you cannot employ a scientist for 
every tomato pulp plant that you happen to have. You do not need 
trained chemists and bacteriologists for every plant. You need in your 
industry, as far as I can see, men of the same type of training and 
education as the average brewmaster; a man who has learned how to 
make beer, but a man who need not necessarily be trained to make a 
chemical analysis. You need chemists, you need bacteriologists; you 
do not need one for each plant everywhere. Now, the brewing schools 
have usually centered around the trade laboratory. They have them 
in Europe, on the Continent as well as in England, and I should not 
wonder that if some day you will find it necessary in connection with 
your scientific laboratory to establish a training school for the men 
who will be the practical men to run your plants. I think that you 
would get better men for that particular purpose than if you expected 
to get them from a university. 

The third subject that I wish to discuss is the question of the value 
of canned goods in the diet. I think I see in scientific literature of 
the day a certain amount of information which, in the hands of the 
laymen, might be converted unintentionally into misinformation. 
There is in the scientific literature at the present time a great deal of 
active work being done on certain diseases such as scurvy, for example, 
and the question has been raised by scientists what effect canned goods 
may have in such cases. We are confronted with a situation which is 
a good deal like the case of so-called polished rice. I hope you will 
pardon me for digressing a moment. There is a disease in those 
portions of the tropics where rice is the main article of diet called 
"beri-beri," which is characterized by paralysis of the nerves that lead 
to the extremities, weakness of the heart and dropsy. Now, it has 
been found out that if you do not eat anything else but polished rice, 
that is to say, rice from which the outer layer has been removed, you 
get "beri-beri." From that it has been assumed by those who did not 
full understand the situation, that if we here in America eat polished 
rice, we run a danger of getting beri-beri. Now, I do not know any- 



body in the United States, unless it be a Chinaman or a Japanese, 
who eats practically nothing but rice, and I do not know of any 
case of beri-beri that has ever occurred in the United States excepting 
on the part of the few negroes from the rice plantations in South 
Carolina, who had idiosyncrasies of taste and lived on very little 
but rice and pork. If we were rice eaters instead of consuming less 
rice than most of the civilized nations — England consumes 25 per 
cent more rice per capita than we do — there might be some sense in 
the argument that the sale of polished rice in the United States is 
injurious to health. Rice for us is only a vegetable; we eat it as we 
eat potatoes, and no one is likely to get beri-beri because he has 
eaten polished rice. What we mean bv polished rice is not what 
the Oriental means by polished rice. The Oriental calls rice that 
has had the hull removed a polished rice; we call a polished rice 
one that has had the hull removed and has been polished with glucose 
and talc. I am not discussing the coating but just the polishing. 

There have been in the literature some tincritical statements about 
canned goods, that canned goods were not entirelv wholesome because 
in the process of canning certain valuable ingredients may have been 
altered. Whether that be true or not. the argument is no more 
binding: in the case of canned sroods than it is in the case of vour 
polished rice for the United States. The argument onlv holds\ where 
canned goods are the main article of diet — but that is true of, any 
diet in which a single definite article is the main or sole article^of 
diet. 

The fishermen of Newfoundland become diseased in the course of 
the winter because they live almost exclusively on wheat flour. Are 
we going to cease eating wheat flour because if you eat nothing but 
wheat flour you are eoing to he sick? That fact is that no diet that 
is one-sided, that no diet which lacks variety, that not diet which lacks 
change, is a wholesome diet: and in making- it possible to vary the 
diet, to give a wide range of foods, the canning industry has done as 
much as any industry because it has made it possible to vary the 
diet at all seasons of the year and under all conditions. 

The psychic factor in diet is one of the most important factors 
that we have to deal with. Tt is not for nothing that we put on, 
in some oarts of the world, our best clothes when we go down to 
dinner. The psychic effect of the expectation of something good 
to eat, as it is vulgarly expressed, "watering of the mouth," is a real 
and valuable physiological phenomena, and so the variation in the diet 
is one of the most important things in keeping the public, the average 
man. in sound and good health. And canned goods in connection 
with refrigeration are the two most important factors in making this 
variation in the diet possible in winter in strange corners of the earth, 
and in times of stress, such as the Belgians, for example, are under- 
going today. A century ago even had we had steam transportation 
and steam vessels that cross the ocean in the time that they do now. 
it would have been quite impossible to have afforded the Belgians 
such measure of relief as they have been afforded today. But such 
an industry as that of canning, of refrigeration, of dessication, has 
made it possible to take care of such emergencies, and the famines 
which were a common thing in the Middle Ages we shall never see 
again. " l " 

Thpse are the three points that I wish to present to you gentlemen 
in this talk. The first, it is a very simple thing to keep your factory 



014 422 3573 



in such a shape that you will have no trouble from contamination with 
micro-organisms; the second, that you need some machinery to train 
your people to run your factories for you; and the third, that you 
need not be afraid in regard to the status of your problems in the 
diet, since they make the varied diet possible, which is one of the 
most important things in nutrition that we have to look out for. I 
thank you very much. (Applause.) 



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